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MONTREAL - Whenever I hear the name “Laura Secord,” a familiar image pops into my head. I’m a kid, it’s Christmas dinner and we’re at my grandmother’s table in Winnipeg. After the turkey leftovers are cleared, out comes the plum pudding, the shortbreads and the white box of Laura Secord chocolates. I always skipped the pudding and dove into that chocolate box, which, once opened, filled the room with this great milk-chocolatey aroma. We all had a favourite, mine being either the marshmallow/caramel chocolate or the French mint square wrapped in that weird green shell.

We gorged on those bonbons, as have so many Canadians since the first Laura Secord opened in Toronto in 1913. Named after the Canadian War of 1812 heroine Laura Secord, the company was so successful that by 1950, there were close to 100 shops in Ontario and Quebec. Today with more than 113 stores in seven provinces, Laura Secord remains Canada’s largest chocolatier. No doubt it also remains the most famous.

For those of us who grew up with the memory of the little Laura Secord shops dotted throughout the city, the nostalgic pull is powerful. I remember the elderly ladies who worked in those boutiques back in the day. I remember the French vanilla ice cream and the butterscotch lollipops (I still love them), and the strawberry jam and the puddings, which are no longer.

And who among us hasn’t experienced that invigorating blood-sugar spike when devouring one of those magical fondant-filled Easter eggs? There may not be many things that unite Canadians from coast to coast, but the Laura Secord sugar rush is certainly one of them.

This year, Laura Secord celebrates its 100th anniversary, yet it has been a struggle to achieve that milestone. The company has been bought and sold many times since Frank P. O’Connor founded the business, having passed from O’Conner to John Labatt, to Rowntree MacIntosh, to Nestlé, to the Archibald Candy Corporation of Chicago. Archibald filed for bankruptcy protection in 2004, broke up its assets, and eventually sold Laura Secord to a Canadian private-equity investment group that included the Fonds de solidarité FTQ.

Sold again in 2010, Laura Secord is now in the hands of Jean and Jacques Leclerc, two brothers well-known in the Quebec food industry who also own a company devoted to chocolate production, Nutriart, a former division of Biscuits Leclerc.

To celebrate its milestone, Laura Secord opened its Quebec City headquarters to the media last week, to ooh and aah their way through a behind-the-scenes look at a modern-day Willy Wonka-like chocolate factory. As scintillating as that sounds, don’t get too excited. Industrial chocolate-making is about as sexy as industrial soup-making.

In this 250,000-square foot-factory space, which produces 50 tons of chocolate a day, the landscape consists of room after room filled with heavy machinery from Switzerland and Germany. Though I imagined candies, ice creams and my favourite marshmallow bars piled high, all of those products are subcontracted out to factories in either Ontario or New Brunswick. The Quebec City factory makes the chocolate itself — from bean to bar, as they say in the business — and we got a glimpse of the entire process.

Cocoa beans are imported from Ivory Coast and South America, washed and sterilized on-site, then ground to a paste and mixed with sugar. That mix is run through a series of five rollers to achieve a super-smooth texture, and then combined with lecithin and Indonesian cocoa butter for fluidity. For the milk chocolate, the milk part is powdered milk, which comes from Abitibi. The mix is then stirred for between six and eight hours (for milk chocolate) and 15 or 16 hours (for dark chocolate) in a process called “conchage.” The finished chocolate is finally stored in huge 42,000-kilogram vats in a room kept at a stifling 40 C, ready to be shaped into Santas, Valentine’s hearts, reindeers, rabbits, chocolate almond bark, cherry blossoms, maple-fudge-filled maple leafs and 400 other products.

That pound-bag of Laura Second chocolate chips contains some 4,000 “pépites aux chocolate,” all produced by one massive German machine complete with a 45-metre-long cooling carpet that gradually chills the chips until they harden, taking about 15 minutes.

Be they purchased online, at a shop, in a drugstore or anywhere else these candies are found, every smidgen of Laura Secord’s white, milk or dark chocolate is fabricated in this factory, which, though massive, happens to be one of the smallest chocolate companies in North America (Hershey being the largest).

Despite the boost it receives from the nostalgia factor, Laura Secord is not a brand chocolate aficionados necessarily reach for. Even the company’s 70 per cent chocolate is very sweet, and lacks depth of flavour and length — save for a nagging bitterness on the finish. This is a mid-range chocolate that works well as a basis for the company’s candies.

Though the company is exploring ideas like offering fair-trade chocolate, “terroir-style” chocolate made from area-specific cocoa beans, and encouraging the sales of its dark chocolate over the now more popular milk, Laura Secord appears reticent to jump on the designer chocolate bandwagon or produce bonbons made with interesting flavours like basil, bacon and balsamic vinegar. It, sadly, also didn’t even come up with an item to celebrate its own 100th birthday. Dommage!

And yet when you open that box at the dinner table, you still get that fabulous whiff of chocolate (that seemingly permeates every inch of the factory, as well as your clothes, hair and skin for hours after the tour).

This isn’t chocolate at the level of the elite brands like Valrhona, Michel Cluizel, Barry-Callebaut or even Green & Black (it’s also cheaper: a 70 g Valrhona bar is $5.99, a 100g Laura Secord bar $3.69). And, yet, like that bottle of Kim Crawford sauvignon blanc, Van Houtte coffee and Twining’s tea, it may not be the foodie choice, but it certainly hits the spot.

You can hear Lesley Chesterman on ICI Radio-Canada Première’s Médium Large (95.1 FM) every Tuesday at 10 a.m., and on CHOM (97.7 FM) every Wednesday at 7:10 a.m.

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